using utterances are called speech acts. There are some descriptive terms to label these utterances, such as apology, complaint, compliment, invitation, promise, or
request 1998: 47. Speech acts consist of three kinds of acts, locutionary acts, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act. Austin in Levinson, 1983: 236
describes these as: a
Locutionary act : a sentence‘s utterance with a sense and reference. b
Illocutionary act : an act of producing utterances with force or the speaker‘s intention.
c Perlocutionary act: the impact on the hearer which comes with the utterance
made by the speaker. In order to make the speech acts to be appropriate or succeeded in certain
circumstances, there are conditions which must be existed, namely felicity condition. Yule 1998: 50-51 distinguishes five main categories of it:
a General conditions: the participants could understand the language which is
used and that they do not pretending to be someone, for example: acting. b
Content condition: the content of the utterances which talks about the future event.
c Preparatory condition: the understanding of the event whether it will happen
by itself, and has a beneficial effect or not. d
Sincerity condition: the speaker must be sincere when uttering the utterances. e
Essential condition: in making a promise, the speaker commits to do what shehe promises to the hearer; and in making a warning, the speaker turns
herselfhimself from non-informing to informing about future event.
2. Conversation Analysis
The interaction by two or more peopleparticipants who cooperate, produce some utterances and respond to one another is usually called as
conversation. Levinson states that conversation happens when two participants freely changing turn in speaking 1983: 284. It is the act of talking in sequence.
The sequence is I talk-you talk-I talk-you talk. The participants of conversation take turn when speaking to each other. The sequence or the structure of
conversation is already assumed or expected by the participants to be happened when they do the conversation. People use conversation for several uses, such as
exchange information, to tell stories, to buy goods, to know other‘s feelings, to understand each other and other social or communicative event.
Conversation is somehow very complex. It could show its own order and
show its own sense of structure Schiffrin, 1994: 232. Thus, in pragmatics, there is a term called conversation analysis which analyzes how the conversations work
and reveals the conventions which conversation has. The analysis is invented by Harvey Sacks along with Emanuel Schelgoff, and Gail Jefferson. It is the
application of an approach called ethnomethodology. Conversation analysis analyzes natural conversations or actual events
which usually happen in people‘s daily lives. Schiffrin 1994: 235 tells that
conversation analysis focuses on the details of real events. Furthermore, this approach tries to reveal how the participants of the conversation are able to
produce clear utterances, and how they could interpret the utterances of other people or participants Nunan, 1993: 84. Conversation analysis also tries to help
other people to have a clear sense or understanding of what the participants are talking to each other. To do so, the notion of context is needed. Schiffrin 1994:
235 states that utterances always have contextual relevance for one another in a conversation.
Schiffrin, Tannen, and Hamilton 2001: 253 claim that the conversation
analysis focuses on the finding of the patterns which people oriented themselves
and each other to some underlying organization of talk. There are some mechanisms or organizations which conversation analysis studies. Those
mechanisms are especially about turn taking, constructing sequences of utterances across turns adjacency pairs, identifying and repairing problems, and how
conversation works in different conventional settings. This research deals with turns happen in a conversation and adjacency pairs, thus, the next sections would
discuss further related to both theories.
3. Turn Taking
In a conversation, people do not talking at the same time, but they wait for their turn to speak. The participants have the right to speak but they need to know
when is they turn to speak or when they have the ‗floor‘ of the conversation. Yule 1998: 71-72 gives an analogy of conversation as a market economy. In this
market, there is a scarce commodity called the floor, or the participant‘s right to
speak. When the participant have the control of the floor, it is called a turn. In a situation, where control is not yet arranged in advance, anyone could attempt to
get control; this is called turn-taking.
Turn taking is a principle which could rule who gets to speak in a conversation Wardaugh, 2006: 298. Through turn taking, the participants of the
conversation could manage the cooperation in conversation Cutting, 2002: 29. The first speaker of the conversation needs to give some time for the second
speaker to make a turn. When the participants give their turns to the other, they could take it for themselves or give it to other participant; those are called local
management system Yule, 1998: 72. Conversation usually runs smoothly because the participants try to
cooperate by understanding the local management system or a set of unwritten conventions in conversation. In understanding the structure of conversation,
Kasper and Blum-Kulka say that there are two aspects to be understood: mechanical aspect and linguistic aspect. The mechanical aspect could be presented
with turn taking, and linguistic aspect is presented with adjacency pairs 1993: 46. Furthermore, Levinson 1983: 303 describes that adjacency pairs is part of
local management organization in conversation. Adjacency pair is one of a sign
that conversation is locally managed or done without any conscious plan because the patterns of adjacency pairs could organize the conversational floor or turn, and
make the participants know what to expect from the response which follows what they are saying. Bloomer, Griffths, and Merrison argue that adjacency pairs are
related to turn-taking mechanism by the adjacency pair‘s rule; that is if one is
finished in producing the first part of adjacency pairs, then one should stop talking and gives opportunity for the next speaker to produce the second part 2005: 62.
Thus, adjacency pairs help the participants to know when the other participants‘
